


No Sooner Met

by mylittleredgirl



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Canon Compliant, Episode Related, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Pining, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-18
Updated: 2020-10-18
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:29:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27072757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mylittleredgirl/pseuds/mylittleredgirl
Summary: "It's only fair," she says. "A command partnership is based on trust."
Relationships: Chakotay/Kathryn Janeway
Comments: 59
Kudos: 159





	No Sooner Met

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CoraClavia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CoraClavia/gifts).



> happy belated birthday, coraclavia!

It doesn’t take long to get to know his new captain. She goes out of her way to make it easy for him.

On Chakotay’s first full day on the job, Janeway stops by his office with two PADDs in hand. The first is a crew manifest, with open positions highlighted. _Voyager_ suffered heavy casualties when they were wrenched across the galaxy, but not all of the vacancies come with a death certificate. Some weren’t staffed to begin with. It’s a new ship, only a few weeks out of spacedock. They’re taking her on one hell of a shakedown cruise.

The second PADD is Janeway’s service record, which she offers with the tip that he now has full access to all her command logs on file.

“It’s only fair,” she says. She has surely studied him, preparing for her mission into the Badlands. No Starfleet captain would go into a potentially hostile situation without research; certainly no captain would offer a wanted renegade a position on her bridge without knowing his history. Tuvok no doubt kept her up to date on his more recent activities. Chakotay only clenches his jaw a little at the thought.

Janeway adds, “A command partnership is based on trust.”

“Thank you, Captain.” He notices how warm her fingers are, brushing against his as she hands him the PADD.

He’ll read her record, and listen to the logs, but she’s showing him quite a bit about her personality and command style just by offering them to him, by calling their unusual situation a _partnership_. She wants him to trust her, not just obey her.

On some level, because of the open-handed way she has treated him since the moment they met, or because of the vestigial Starfleet officer code of conduct he has never quite managed to shake, he already does.

*

With only a few bumps early on, they work well together. He catches her looking over his shoulder, sometimes, but never intrusively.

Her social invitations surprise him. They have dinner together twice in the captain’s dining room—while they still have one—and she asks him personal questions he can’t explain away as anything other than a desire to get to know him. He sees the warmth with which she treats her crew, how she offers encouragement and praise with a smile or a soft hand on the shoulder. He thinks this is something similar: she likes a genial working culture aboard her ship, and she wants to become friendly with him, if not true friends.

She listens well, with a focus that makes it easy to open up to her. Her questions about his people and his spirituality would seem invasive if they were asked with less genuine curiosity. He finds himself eager to share.

Maybe, after so long living at the edge of himself, enduring cramped living conditions with people as angry and lost as he, he’s craving a softer kind of connection. In many ways, their journey now is just as desperate, just as life-and-death, but death and desperation feel distant in _Voyager’s_ clean, brightly-lit rooms. He opens his medicine bundle for his new captain, introduces her to pieces of himself she can’t possibly understand, and when she lets her eyes drift closed in front of him, it feels like both a gift and a relief.

She trusts him, too.

*

It takes him longer to figure out there’s more to their connection—on his end, anyway—than loyalty.

There’s a special kind of devotion any good Starfleet officer feels toward their captain, one bound up with duty and service and surrender. It allows a crew to work together and survive impossible odds. Without it, people will die. Without it, people might not be willing to die when that’s the only chance for the whole to survive.

So, for a while, he thinks it’s that. She’s the best captain he’s ever served with, the bravest, the least likely to blink in the face of danger. In the heat of crisis, he never doubts that her intelligence and resourcefulness will get them out of any situation. In his more self-indulgent moments, he thinks his steadfast faith amplifies her natural ability, that his support helps as much as any tactical suggestion he makes.

For the better part of a year, he doesn’t question it. Caring about the captain’s well-being is part of his role; it might take a creative reading of his job description to factor encouraging her to take time in the holodeck into that equation, or bringing her soup from the mess hall when she hasn’t left her ready room for nine hours, but their circumstances are unusual, and it does no one any good to have a captain who’s battling her own needs as well as the Delta Quadrant.

But he notices, eventually, catches himself watching her hands as she works a console, lingering on the Bridge after his shift is over if she’s still there. He wakes sometimes with a smile already on his face, thinking about her even before his eyes are open when he has a breakfast meeting to look forward to. They have weekly dinners, and he uses creative means to extend them, holding back a conversational point he knows will captivate her attention until dessert is almost finished. He has no business spending as much time as he does wondering how long her hair is, or how it would look falling over her shoulders if she ever wore it down.

The first time, the very first time she shows doubt in the purpose of their mission, _Voyager_ is resting on solid ground, and she looks so different in the natural sunlight streaming through the window that he can’t stop staring. He tells her about the places on Earth he longs for the most and imagines her there beside him, in the Arizona desert, in the warm water off the Texas coast. He renews his pledge to travel with her to the end of the galaxy, so she’ll know she’s not alone. He’d go farther, without hesitation, if she asked.

He knows she doesn’t need this from him, this slow-burning infatuation that’s too deep within him to be called a crush, so he holds it close and quiet and lets it fuel his desire to do well for her.

Surely it will fade with time, unrequited as it is, but he finds he doesn’t want it to. 

*

She suffers on New Earth, struggles with losing her identity and her ship and the hope of ever seeing her mission through.

It’s easier for him; his purpose hasn’t changed. He’s still serving his captain, and in ways he slowly realizes he always wanted to. He ensures she has good food to eat, offers a willing ear when she wants to talk, tries to surround her with whatever creature comforts he can build to distract her from this life she doesn’t want. He has always found it easier to show his affection with action rather than words, and it’s much more satisfying to build gifts for her with his own hands than it was to cover a bridge shift or fill her computer terminal with reports to read.

He misses his friends, mourns that he’ll never know what will happen to his brave shipmates and his people and the cause he left behind in the Alpha Quadrant, but this quiet life with a woman he cares about feels more like a blessing than a life sentence. He takes long walks in woods that quickly seem like home, lets the icy river currents pull him around when he swims, and he feels a sense of place, of belonging. He discovers a capacity for contentment that’s been absent in him for years, if not his entire life.

He falls deeply, wildly in love with her.

Kathryn is a revelation, all the brilliance and willfulness of Captain Janeway with so much more beneath. He’s intoxicated by the intimacy of it all, living only inches from each other, making breakfast while she drinks her coffee and brushes her hair. He tries not to stare, he does, looks away from the frosted glass dividing their living and sleeping spaces to avoid gazing at the silhouetted shape of her changing clothes, but on the rare mornings when the birds outside are quiet, he can’t help but hold his breath to listen for the slide of fabric on pale skin.

There are nights when he can’t sleep, his heart too full with the sound of her breathing and the way their once-sterile modular shelter now smells like her, like both of them. With his eyes closed, he can almost imagine the two meters of space between their beds doesn’t exist, that she’ll be close enough to touch, if he reaches out his hand. That perhaps, one day, when the specter of their lost lives is farther away, she’ll want him to.

He doesn’t plan to tell her, doesn’t want to make his longing something she needs to manage, but the night after the storm, she asks him to.

“I need time, Chakotay,” she finally says, breaking a long and wonderful silence.

He has used all the words he has, so he acknowledges it with a gentle squeeze of her hand in his.

She smiles then, lightening the intensity between them like sun spilling over the hills outside, and he wonders how much more he can love her with another ten years, or fifty. They have so much time.

*

As it turns out, they don’t.

But they _do_ —another seventy years ahead of them in this shared journey, if they can survive the anomalies and inhabitants of the Delta Quadrant that long. They will survive, because he can’t afford to have doubts, not in front of the crew and not in front of her. There are so many things they can’t afford, when their decisions are often all that stand between a hundred and fifty people and the dangers of hostile space.

They talk about it before leaving New Earth, the growing connection between them, but they almost don’t need to. They come into the conversation with the same conclusion. He knows himself too well to believe that he can impartially check her decisions if he shares her bed—of all the lessons he learned from his fraught history with Seska, his flawed objectivity stands out the most. He knows Kathryn, too, and what _Voyager_ demands of her. She’s at her best when pointed at a singular goal, and their goal is too important to endanger with distractions.

They can’t be in love, so they become something else.

He’s had close friends before, brothers and sisters in arms, but never like her. There are times it feels like she has her hands in his chest, digging out better and stronger pieces of him than he knew were there, and then presenting them to him with that know-it-all grin he can never resist. He likes to think he does the same for her, that his sometimes shameless adoration keeps her going through a mission no captain would choose.

Sometimes he _wants_ , though, so much he can barely stand it. The smallest things will set it off: the curl of her fingers around her fork at a shared dinner, the way she slaps at his arm when he makes her laugh. She goes on a harmless produce-gathering mission once, because she’s desperate for a break and Neelix all but pushes her onto the transporter pad, and seeing her after she returns, freckled with sunshine, dirt under her fingernails, brings every part of it back to him.

He dreams of her that night, of them like they never were on New Earth but might have become if _Voyager_ never returned. It’s vivid, her body above him and soft grass beneath, her mouth at his ear whispering promises she’ll never make when they have a galaxy of danger between them and home.

He wakes in tangled sheets in a room lit only by stars, and it breaks his heart.

Then at breakfast, she’s standing by a table of their friends and colleagues, rolling her eyes at whatever bridge Tom Paris is trying to sell her. When she sees him, her eyes light up like he’s the only man in the room, and he’s made whole again.

*

He wonders sometimes what the others think of them, when he’s seen entering her quarters with a bottle of wine or leaving after a dinner that ran late into the evening. When they walk into crew gatherings with her arm tucked in his. When she’s wearing sandals and a flowy civilian dress appropriate to the holographic beach venue, and he can’t keep his eyes off her.

It’s on one of those nights that they slip, a light-hearted evening among friends where he orders her drinks from the holographic bar and she always seems to be touching him. They’re mid-conversation when they make it back to her quarters so he follows her inside, and when she goes to take off her necklace, the clasp gets stuck in her hair.

She’s laughing when she asks for his help, and so is he when he realizes his efforts are only making it worse.

“I should just cut my hair off,” she says with a dramatic groan as she finally rips the necklace free. “It’s hardly a necessity.”

“Don’t,” he says, still holding soft strands of it. “It’s beautiful.”

He feels the energy shifting, like the tide coming in. “Do you think so?”

He wants to speak, but no words come, no way he can reduce how he sees her to a simple answer. It would take him a lifetime to explain it. His gaze slides to her eyes, then her mouth. Like it was always going to happen, she kisses him.

It’s slow and soft and perfect, and fills him like he could live on this alone. He could kiss her for hours, just like this, and die happy.

When they part, he rests his forehead on hers, keeping his eyes closed to drink her in with his other senses.

“Kathryn,” he breathes, not sure what he’s going to confess until it’s out of his mouth. “I’m falling in love with you.” Like he isn’t already, hasn’t been for a year now, so deep in that it’s a wonder he can fall any further.

She exhales like she’s about to laugh, and when he looks up, she’s beaming at him. She knows as well as he does. The feelings between them they sometimes fail so badly to disguise are their most precious private joke.

She holds one hand to his cheek, a gesture full of so much affection he almost doesn’t mind that it’s all this night will hold.

“We have time,” she promises, thumb brushing over his lips and then gently tapping his chin, like punctuation on a sentence.

He captures her hand with both of his and presses it to his heart. Before he lets her go, he kisses the tips of her fingers. “We do.”

*

The years get harder after that, each one more so than the last.

They disagree, and spend less time together, and he’s never sure which of those is the effect and which is the cause. She’s angrier than she used to be, at the Borg, at Seven, mostly at herself. Sometimes at him, too. Sometimes, if he’s honest, he makes her angry on purpose.

His bruised feelings help no one, so he tries to put them on the shelf. He looks for ways to get space from her: volunteering for long away missions, building his friendships with Tom and Harry and B’Elanna, flirting with other women. The very fact that he thinks of them as _other women_ , years after the one and only time they kissed, should tell him how well it’s working.

He tries to fall out of love with her. First, because she seems to want him to, when she shows up on the Bridge with short hair and refuses to look him in the eye. Later, because he feels good pieces of himself eroding under the constant pressure of a never-ending journey, and he wants to hide it from her.

Last, as she boards a Borg ship, because he thinks he can’t both love her and stand watch while she tries, over and over again, to find the right way to die.

He fails, though, always, and he usually realizes it in sickbay, watching her chest rise and fall. His presence at her bedside is such a known constant that the Doctor no longer tries to shoo him away. Chakotay breathes along with her, matching her every inhale and exhale like meditation, steadied by the tangible reassurance that they still have time.

*

If their journey through the Delta Quadrant was sometimes a nightmare, he doesn’t know what to call their hard landing back home.

He expected, knowing what happened to the Cardassian DMZ, not to have a recognizable home to come back to; he didn’t expect Kathryn and the others to face the same fate. The Federation scratched out a victory in a long and bloody war, but the damage is evident everywhere, from the rebuilt Golden Gate Bridge, to the tribute plaques for lost ships numbering in the thousands, to the demeanor of the Starfleet admirals they face down at the debriefings.

She is asked to answer for her decisions in the Delta Quadrant, in grueling detail. He’s dragged through all his actions, and those of his former Maquis crew, from a lifetime ago, when the Delta Quadrant still meant nothing to him. In the evenings, on weekends, they try and tend to the stragglers of their crew, those with even harsher and lonelier welcomes than theirs.

Kathryn says, once, on a coffee break between what feel like interrogation sessions, “Makes you miss a good Hirogen hunting party, doesn’t it?” and it startles a laugh out of him. It’s contagious, and then she’s laughing too, and he realizes they haven’t done this even once since their feet touched down on Earth.

With warmth in his chest, he reaches over to touch her arm. She nods, _me too_ , and he’s missed this far longer, their way of having an entire conversation in only a look.

He thinks, with different timing, his fledgling relationship with Seven could have been something brief and sweet and good for both of them. For her, it could have been an introduction to a side of herself she’s newly willing to explore; for him, a reminder of how he enjoys the discovery phase of romance, the process of learning how another person likes to be loved. As it is, with their abrupt return compounded by a dysregulated cortical node and Starfleet’s less than warm reaction to an “ex-Borg,” romance is quickly swept off the list of priorities. Kathryn knows Seven better than he does, and they struggle together to help her find her place. When the place she chooses is far from Earth, far from them, it leaves them both a little shaken.

Nothing could surprise him more than when, on what’s set to be their last day in front of the Office of Professional Review, he and Kathryn are both promoted.

They’re both still standing there, stunned, when the admirals leave them alone. He looks down at the provisional rank bar in his hand that he wore for seven years, the scratches especially evident in the harsh interior lighting, and waits for his brain to catch up.

“Computer, end program,” he hears her say, and when he looks up in surprise, she shrugs. “Worth checking.” After a beat, she draws a deep breath and sticks her right hand out toward him. “Congratulations, Captain.”

He takes it, shakes her hand like they’re strangers, and his stomach lurches with the realization that she’s no longer his captain. Their service on _Voyager_ is over. When they leave this room, she has no professional reason to ever see him again.

Personal reasons, of course, but with how they sometimes treated each other in their last years on _Voyager_ , with how he treated _her_ , she might not know how much he wants that. He’s lost everything else; if he loses her friendship, he’ll be nothing except the new pips on his collar.

“Let’s go somewhere.” He means dinner, or a drink, something to prolong this moment and cement their connection before three months of leave take them their separate ways, but when she answers, she’s looking right in his eyes like it means so much more.

“Please,” she says. “Far, _far_ from here.”

*

Given what they’ve been through in the last two and a half months, he shares her desire to get out of San Francisco. Given what they went through for seven years before that, he doesn’t expect that her first action as a Starfleet admiral will be to requisition a shuttle and leave the planet.

She slides into the pilot’s chair before he can, and he lets her chart their course. He assumes she’s taking them to _Voyager,_ docked at McKinley station for refit, and braces himself.

It isn’t until they pass through Earth’s crowded upper atmosphere, heading out to open space, that he feels like he can breathe. He’s not sure he’ll ever be ready to see their home in the hands of strangers, stripped and cleaned of the evidence of a journey he thought would take their whole lives.

“Are you eager to leave Earth already?” he teases, as a way of asking where she’s taking him. They’ve only ever had one destination; it feels strange to be headed in the wrong direction.

“Eager for a change of perspective.” He watches her graceful fingers work the console as she slows their ascent, settling them into an orbit well beyond the moon. From here, Earth is small enough on the viewscreen to fit in the palm of his hand.

They’re quiet for a long, long time. He studies her from the corner of his eye, seeing the weight of all the years since they met. He hoped that their return home would lift it from her.

She eventually breaks the silence. “Tell me about your favorite place on Earth.”

He thinks, then tells her about the Sonoran Desert at sunset, streaks of color like vibrant fingers across the sky. His maternal grandmother lived in Arizona her whole life and it’s the first place on Earth he ever saw. She embraced most modern conveniences—a replicator, sonic cleansers—but refused to allow a universal translator in her home, and spoke to him only in Cocopah in a futile hope he would learn it.

“I didn’t know that,” Kathryn says. “It’s strange, isn’t it? That there are still things we don’t know about each other.”

He thought once, only weeks after they first met, that he had her figured out. “What secrets are you keeping?”

“I don’t think I know anymore.” She looks down at her hands, where she’s picking at her thumbnail. “I went home, you know? It wasn’t the same. Or, rather—it was _exactly_ the same, and I…”

He breathes out, slowly, letting her unspoken confession sink into the air around them. She wipes at her eyes, not bothering to hide it from him now that she’s no longer in command. He remembers again the new ranks on their uniforms, the void of mandated leave in front of them, the unknown of how far apart their next postings will take them.

He asks, gently, “What will you do now?” He’s never known Kathryn Janeway to be long without a plan.

She chuckles and shakes her head, looking out at the world they sacrificed so much to see again. “I was thinking of growing out my hair.”

He freezes, feeling an anticipation rising around them he thought they’d long put to bed. He spent weeks, after she cut it, going back and forth with himself about whether it was a message.

His mouth feels dry when he asks, “Literally, or metaphorically?”

A smile pricks at the corner of her lips. She looks at him then for at least a minute, her eyes moving over his face like she’s taking him in piece by piece. Her voice is clear when she asks, “Do you think it’s too late for us to get to know each other again?”

He can’t speak, the moment too big in his throat to get words past it. For a moment, it’s like they’re everywhere at once: in their little home on New Earth, on the Bridge, in her quarters with one kiss between them and the hope that one day, after everything, they’d make it here. 

She prompts, less sure: “Please, Chakotay, say something.”

Instead, he reaches out for her hand, slides his fingers between hers until their palms touch. When he squeezes, the relief in her face cracks something open in him. If it really had taken them seventy-five years, if they arrived on Earth ancient and frail, he’d be just as willing. “We’ll always have time, Kathryn.”

“We have three months,” she says, “right now.”

He grins, surprised joy spilling over in a way he could never hope to contain. He assumed, with all the strength of habit and self-preservation, that this conversation was a promise for the future, beginning the next pause in a relationship defined by waiting. By now, he really should know better than to try and predict her. 

The blank space on his calendar that felt so daunting and lonely an hour ago is now alive with possibility. “What do you want to do with it?”

“Well, _Captain_ …” she says, with the mischievous smile that makes his heart race like he’s 19 again, or like he’s 38 and first meeting the woman he might love his entire life. “… I think there’s one more inhabited planet for us to explore.”

*

The second time he ever kisses her, they’re in France.

They’re there as something of a nostalgic joke, to see the real Sandrine’s. Tom is supposed to be with them, but he begged off with new father exhaustion, and Chakotay doesn’t mind a change of plans that lets him have Kathryn to himself.

He also doesn’t mind when, with their drinks still half-full on the table, she wants to leave. “I like ours better,” she explains as she puts on her coat, and he hears an undertone of sadness that resonates in his bones. The smell of the place is wrong, the back wall too close for comfort. He can’t call to mind a single detail about the holographic background patrons from Tom’s program, but he feels their absence nonetheless.

He’s felt that a lot, in the months since their return, the week and a half since their debrief ended. Earth is real, and wondrous, but it’s uncomfortable after so long living with only their memories of it, and he’s grateful to have Kathryn with him as he faces it. 

She slips her hand in his as they walk along the harbor, and then he’s grateful for other reasons. More so when, after five or ten minutes walking in silence, she tugs him to a stop and touches her lips to his.

“Okay?” she asks, like he hasn’t been contemplating doing the same all night, all week. For so, so much longer.

Earth’s moon is full in the sky, like he’s dreaming, but the cold wind off the ocean is too tangible to doubt. One of his hands cups her cheek, fingers catching in her soft hair. He wraps his other arm around her waist, holding her close and steady, and kisses her like he’ll never stop.

*

After the first time they make love, he doesn’t sleep.

She drifts off, for a while. He’s unwilling to stop touching her, now that he can, but he holds his hand still on her ribs to keep from waking her. He cracked them once, beating life back into her on an alien planet a galaxy away, and the memory of that and a dozen other near-misses makes her every breath feel all the more precious. He goes through them in his mind, disasters medical and professional and personal, holding them up against this quiet night in San Francisco.

Whether the jagged corners of their journey were worth it or not doesn’t matter, really, in the grand and mostly immutable scheme of the universe, but from where he lies now, they all were.

Her breathing deepens and then she stirs, interrupting his contemplation. “You’re still here.”

His heart catches on her dreamy smile. “Always,” he says. He won’t be, of course, physically, but that doesn’t change the sentiment.

Sleep slowly clears from her eyes. She looks the way she does when she’s putting a puzzle together. “You knew, didn’t you?”

He shakes his head just enough to remind her that he can’t read her mind, and runs his thumb back and forth under her breast.

She moves under him, picks up his hand before it can wander too far and holds it tight in hers. “You knew it would be us, at the end.”

He thinks back over their life, wondering if he was ever sure. “I hoped,” he finally says.

She snuggles closer, pushing him over so she can rest her head on his chest, still holding his hand. “So did I.”

*end*


End file.
